ROME.- Among latest acquisitions, Ottocento Art Gallery offers a masterpiece by Ferrara painter Giovan Battista Crema ( 1875 –1948 ) which embodied his high-quality divisionist technique.

The effect of the luminous vibration, typical of the divisionist technique, is revealed in this painting, giving the viewer a soft light, coming from the deep source of the intimate. In this highly refined interior, “ideism” reigns, a conception of art as a psychological emanation of the artist, which in the specific case of Crema, is softened by his intent to faithfully bring back the inner reality of the depicted subject. On the other hand, the elegant reader seems immersed in a timeless fluid, in a suspended dimension, her enigmatic and absorbed figure evokes a symbolist sensibility. The delicacy of the pose, the naturalness of the description, the face inclined to chase the fantasies enclosed in the book, relegate the composition into a dreamy dimension of elegant intimacy. Even objects that refer to the everyday – the copper bowl with the plant in the background and the sofa in the foreground – tell of an abandonment to the grace and peace of rest in the home.

As Lucio Scardino (1993) has pointed out, “inclinations are already felt at this stage, which then become” exclusive “- for a landscape with symbolist accents […] or for the smug representation of bourgeois rites, especially women’s, in affinity with other worldly divisions of the capital city[…] “, Although linked to Previati for the mystical tone of the works, Crema expresses himself through a divisionism sui generis, of a more decorative type. As De Pisis noted in an article published in 1922, in the “Gazzetta Ferrarese”, Crema should be exalted as a “worshiper of color, in fact, a researcher almost in the scientific sense of the effects of it. He is convinced that one of the greatest achievements of modern painting lies precisely in the greater intensity and luminosity of color, compared to the ancients, even higher”.

The work presented here should be placed in the decades of the twentieth century, within the first divisionist stage of the Ferrara painter, inaugurated in the summer of 1901, when he participated in the III Exposition of the Promoter of Fine Arts in Livorno. A phase that found a decisive turning point when, once settled in the capital, Crema was linked to the group of young avant-garde artists (Severini, Boccioni, Balla, Prini, Baccarini, Cambellotti), a frequentation fundamental for the execution of the triptych “The History of the painful blind and two nudes “, presented in 1905 at the Mostra del Circolo Amatori e Cultori of Rome, works that already showed a more intense divisionist flavor and that had already begun to turn to representations of more bourgeois themes and warm openings to symbolism, then resulted in paintings similar to the composition presented here.